Why I Disagree With "Dropping the T"

Every time somebody says, “LGB should just ditch the T.” I understand why it sounds appealing on the surface. If your only exposure to transgender people is social media, then congratulations: you’ve met the internet’s equivalent of the emergency room waiting area and assumed that’s what humanity looks like. The algorithm does not reward “Person quietly lives an ordinary life, pays taxes, buys groceries, and goes home.” No. It rewards “Person wearing six pounds of blush over a 5 o’clock shadow, screaming at a city council meeting because reality committed a hate crime.”

Those are different demographics.

And yes, there are absolutely people who are profoundly mentally ill, attention-seeking, manipulative, or just plain creepy who have wrapped themselves in the transgender label. Some are exploiting it. Some desperately need psychiatric treatment before anything else. Some are simply awful human beings who would’ve found some identity to weaponize.

But here’s where I think we’ve made a spectacular mistake.

Years ago, transition wasn’t treated as something you wandered into because Tumblr told you your favorite color was feminity. It involved extensive psychological evaluation. Doctors wanted to know whether someone actually had persistent gender dysphoria, whether there were other psychiatric conditions involved, whether they understood what they were doing, and whether transition was likely to help rather than make everything worse.

Modern activist culture often treats any gatekeeping as oppression, so we’ve swung from “let’s make sure this treatment is appropriate” to “asking questions is violence.” In a wrong-headed attempt to make things “easier, we’ve abandoned people who have serious underlying issues, and need serious help.

Ironically, the people hurt most by this aren’t the activists. They’re ordinary people with gender dysphoria who just want to live their lives with a little less misery. Those people generally aren’t making TikToks from the women’s restroom while announcing they’ve overthrown the concept of biological sex. They’re trying to disappear into normal society.

The loudest representatives of any movement are never the healthiest members. If your organization’s public relations department appears to have been recruited from a combination psychiatric ward and improv theater, perhaps the solution isn’t to eject everyone else. Perhaps it’s to stop pretending that every behavior must be celebrated merely because someone attached an identity label to it.

So no, I don’t think the answer is kicking the “T” out. I think the answer is expecting healthy standards. Insist on proper psychological care. Call out obvious bad actors. Stop treating every criticism as genocide. Stop confusing compassion with the complete absence of judgment.

Communities don’t become healthier by pretending every member is fine. They become healthier by helping the people who need help, and refusing to let the loudest dysfunctional people define everyone else.